A Secret to Creative Problem Solving

 

Ever find yourself going over and over a problem in your business, only to hit a dead end or draw a blank?

Find an innovative solution with one simple technique: re-describe the problem.

"The whole idea behind creative problem solving is the assumption that you know something that will help solve this problem, but you're not thinking of it right now," explains Art Markman, cognitive psychologist and author of "Smart Thinking." Put another way, your memory hasn't found the right cue to retrieve the information you need.

Changing the description tells your mind that you're in a different situation, which unlocks a new set of memories. "The more different ways you describe the problem you're trying to solve, the more different things you know about that you will call to mind," says Markman.
Ask yourself two questions:

1. What type of problem is this?
Most of the time, we get stuck on a problem because our focus is too narrow. When you think specifically, you limit your memory and stifle creativity.

Instead, think more abstractly. Find the essence of the problem.

Take vacuum cleaner filters, for example. Vacuums used to have bags that were constantly getting clogged, so innovators focused on how to make a better filter.

James Dyson realized that the problem was actually about separation, or separating the dirt from the air, which doesn't always require a filter. "That freed him to try lots of different methods of separation," says Markman. Hence: the Dual Cyclone vacuum that led Dyson to fame and fortune

2. Who else has faced this type of problem?
When you think about your problem abstractly, you realize that other people have solved the same type of problem in radically different ways. One of their solutions may hold the key to yours.

For example, Dyson realized sawmills use an industrial cyclone to separate sawdust from air and modified that technology to create the first filter-free vacuum.

"When you begin to realize that the problem you're trying to solve has been solved over and over again by people in other areas, you can look at the solutions they came up with to help you solve your own," Markman says.

You may not use one of their solutions exactly, but you free your memory to retrieve more information, making that elusive "aha" moment easier to reach.

By re-describing the problem, you're much more likely to find inspiration for a truly creative innovation.

Nadia Goodman

Nadia Goodman is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY. She is a former editor at YouBeauty.com, where she wrote about the psychology of health and beauty. She earned a B.A. in English from Northwestern University and an M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University.

5 Incredible Entrepreneurs and What We Can Learn From Them

Ilya Pozin, 

Entrepreneurship is growing at a breakneck pace. And with our technological revolution, businesses are scaling and impacting the world more than ever before. For the United States to remain competitive, innovation and entrepreneurship must remain center stage. After all, entrepreneurship has been the primary engine of job creation in our economy over the last several decades – from 1980 to 2005, new companies (less than 5 years old) were responsible for nearly all net job growth in America.

 

But it is not only jobs and wealth which entrepreneurs create. Oftentimes, business creators bring forth solutions that solve society’s most difficult problems, provide inspiration and brighten our future. To celebrate entrepreneurship and its contributions, here is a list of five truly incredible entrepreneurs and lessons we can learn from them:

1. Bill Drayton, Ashoka

Lesson Learned: Incorporate empathy into your business

Widely considered the “father of social enterprise,” Bill Drayton has extended the idea of entrepreneurship into the spheres of education, health, environment and human rights. He regards empathy as the most powerful factor in forming an organization. The ability to see, understand and feel from the perspective of others, he says, is absolutely key in the process of creating a business that will be helpful and desirable.

Empathy played a role in Drayton’s founding of Ashoka, a global enterprise that identifies and invests in social entrepreneurs across the globe. Ashoka currently operates in over 70 countries and supports the work of over 2,000 social entrepreneurs making important contributions.

2. Oleg Firer, Unified Payments

Lesson Learned: Start young

As the founder of the number one fastest growing business on the Inc. 500 list in 2012, Oleg Firer’s career is a testament to the power of starting young as an entrepreneur. Firer started his first business at 17 and worked hard through successes and failures for the next twelve years, when he founded credit card processing company Unified Payments in 2007.

By 2012, Unified Payments was processing $10 billion worth of transactions for 100,000 merchants a year – with a mind-boggling three-year growth rate of 23,646.3 percent.

Firer undoubtedly achieved his success in large part due to the hard lessons learned from being in business at such a young age.

3. Halle Tecco, Rock Health

Lesson Learned: Pick a specific niche

It seems that accelerators, incubators and other startup-boosting programs are popping up everywhere. So when Halle Tecco graduated from Harvard Business School in 2011 and set out to create an accelerator program, she picked a specific niche to tackle: healthcare technology.

Today, Tecco’s accelerator — known as Rock Health – has provided dozens of health tech startups with millions in collective funding.

Rock Health tripled its revenue last year and has solidified itself as the first accelerator exclusively focused on health startups.

Tecco’s success proves the importance of picking a specific niche and sticking to it. In the words of marketing genius Seth Godin: don’t be a generalist that is pretty good at lots of things, rather be a specialist that is great at one thing.

4. Aaron and Karine Hirschhorn, DogVacay

Lesson Learned: Use personal pain points to inspire your business idea

When husband and wife Aaron and Karine Hirschhorn couldn’t find the right overnight kennel for their dogs, they decided to take matters into their own hands and created a marketplace that pairs traveling pet owners with local pet-sitters. Since being founded last year, LA-based DogVacay has raised over $6 million in venture capital and is increasing revenue 60 percent monthly.

The online service, dubbed “the Airbnb for pets,” has already booked 50,000 nights for pets and has paid over $1 million to pet-sitters signed up with the site.

The Hirschhorns identified a simple pain point in their own lives and created a business that solved the problem. Entrepreneurs should remember that great businesses are often born from observations of and attempts to solve personal pain points.

5. Jake Nickell, Threadless

Lesson Learned: Build a community around your business

Jake Nickell founded Threadless over a decade ago on the premise that a community of individuals would contribute and determine the T-shirt designs his company would print and sell.

More than two million artists have submitted their designs to Threadless and collectively vote on which designs will go to print. The company, which is rumored to be at $30 million or more in annual revenue, sells millions of shirts each year and gives previously unknown artists a spotlight.

Nickell says his goal is to “give the creative minds of the world more opportunities to make and sell great art.” His constant focus on community building and collaboration has been at the heart of Threadless’ success.

The Rise of the Digital CMO

by Jake Sorofman

Fact: When it comes to marketing spending, analog still outstrips digital by a factor of three to one. How could this be?, you ask. Digital marketing provides targeted reach and measurable impact. Innovative digital marketing approaches in social media, CRM, and other areas dominate the discussion. Nevertheless, analog spending still rules, as confirmed by Gartner's 2013 digital marketing spending report. Shouldn't CMOs and all marketers be shocked by this? Sure, an ample pile of dollars can be attributed to big spending on a few analog media channels, like Super Bowl ads, for example. But I would suggest that there is something more fundamental happening behind the numbers; something lurking in the very nature of digital marketing and what it asks of leadership and what it means for accountability.

The Digital Disconnect
First, there's a digital disconnect in the executive ranks, a leadership vacuum created by a mismatch between expertise and authority. Like so many other revolutions, digital marketing has taken hold from the bottom up. Here, we find digital natives steeped in digital culture and practice — twenty- and thirty-somethings who came of age on the social web. Squint your eyes and you see tomorrow's CMOs. But today's CMO is different: the corporate attire may be gone, but the assimilation to the new digital culture is incomplete. 

You can see a strong precedent for this in the open source software movement, which didn't go mainstream until its early adopters progressed through the ranks. Yesterday's Linux hackers are now the chief architects and CIOs of the largest enterprises. Unsurprisingly, open source has become a key part of most enterprise IT architectures. But open source only crossed the chasm once its champions came of age. Many CMOs see their digital future, but struggle to make the case across the executive ranks, where resistance is born of unfamiliarity, fear, or misperceptions about what digital marketing means for the brand. "But we're a traditional company" is no longer a credible line of defense, though, unbelievably, it is still a more common one than you'd think. 

Perhaps digital marketing won't go native until the natives occupy the executive suite. But I'm betting it will only accelerate because, unlike the open source movement which was initially about cost, digital marketing is plainly driven by revenue. Digital experiences and engagement draw consumers closer to a brand and more efficiently drive conversions and transactions, both online and off. 

The Consequence of Measurement
Second, digital marketing is illuminating in ways both powerful and problematic. Analog practices leave room for ambiguity. The numbers matter, but can't always be counted with precision. ROI is often ambiguous and anecdotal, which can relieve the CMO of true accountability. To be fair, many CMOs do want greater visibility. They're tired of the murkiness clouding the space between investment and impact.

Others, however, long for the bygone days when the big idea was sufficient. The CMO could tap dance through the average board meeting, as long as revenue tracked up and to the right. Like Mad Men's Don Draper, the CMO became the master of the soft-shoe performance. 

But with digital techniques, everything is measurable. Feedback loops tighten, segmentation becomes microtargeting, and optimizations can happen on the fly or even in real time. The relationship between investment and impact becomes correlated and causal — and the CMO becomes accountable down to the dime and moment by moment. Light dawns on the marketing spend! This transparency is powerful when quarters are turning into dollars for the business — but potentially perilous when the opposite is the case.

The Digital CMO
Now, a few CMOs may feel unfairly implicated here. Apologies! Of course, there are indeed strong examples of digital converts who have completed this assimilation successfully and built world-class digital marketing organizations that reimagine brand engagement, and even reinvent business models.

What do these "digital CMOs" do differently? They experiment aggressively. They hire smart digital natives — and empower them. They partner with great agencies. They have the humility to admit what they don't know, the courage to toss out the old playbook, and the confidence to allow digital metrics to illuminate the results. 

Some hire a chief technologist. Sometimes it's a peer to the CMO, perhaps a chief digital officer, which Gartner predicts will be present in 25% of enterprises by 2015. Sometimes it's a chief marketing technologist reporting to the CMO, which Gartner already finds in 70% of marketing organizations today. In both cases, this role is the designated left brain to the CMO's right. 

Digital CMOs also think beyond digital marketing. They look for opportunities to create digital experiences and revenue streams enabled by the nexus of forces, which is Gartner's description of the convergence and mutual reinforcement of social, mobile, cloud and rich information. The collision of these factors unlocks opportunities to reach and engage with consumers across the physical and virtual worlds, drawing them closer with targeted, contextually relevant experiences and offers. Further, it can allow brands to redefine how value is created and delivered — the way Apple has with music, Amazon has with IT infrastructure, and Netflix has with movies.

Last year, Gartner predicted that by 2017, the CMO's technology budget will exceed the CIO's. Why? Because more often than not, it's the CMO who is expected to drive this digital transformation, which is deeply dependent on technology. Is the average CMO ready to step up to this challenge? 

Some CMOs are preparing for the digital revolution by filling the gap between expertise and authority. In other words, they have the self-awareness and the confidence to take bold action even when the context has shifted beyond their sphere of influence and scope of expertise. That is leadership. Others are afraid of the digital disruption — or exhausted by what it will take to convert digital resistors in the executive suite. 

But as we've witnessed through the economic and technological upheavals of recent years, and the resulting creation and destruction of business models, markets and careers — disruptions can be swift and unrelenting, and it is much better to be a disruptor than one of those being disrupted.

Jake Sorofman

Jake Sorofman is a research director with Gartner for Marketing Leaders, from Gartner, Inc. Read Jake’s blog and follow him on Twitter @jakesorofman.

3 Tips for Leading Successful Change

BY Nadia Goodman 

image credit: Shutterstock.com

Many times in your career as an entrepreneur, you'll need to make a bold change in your small business or startup. You'll enter new markets, overhaul product lines, or step up your customer service game. When you succeed, you'll do so against enormous odds.

More than half of business's change initiatives fail, according to research by Greg Shea , an adjunct professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and co-author of a new book, Leading Successful Change (Wharton Digital, 2013).

He has spent decades helping companies implement effective change. He argues that change initiatives so often fail because most people overlook one essential factor: human behavior.

Change needs to be designed with human behavior in mind. "People generally behave in a way that makes sense to them," Shea says. "They adapt to the environment they're in." If the environment doesn't change, neither do they.

In order to create effective change, focus on your employees' role in that effort. " What's the behavior that's going to make those changes happen?" Shea says. And beyond that, what is the environment that encourages those behaviors?

To answer those questions and create effective change, try these three tips:

1. Create a scene.
To understand what needs to change, describe a scene in your ideal future, explaining what your employees would be doing after the change takes place. For example, if you want innovative ideas to arise more organically, then describe what a product development phase would look like if that was the case. What skills would people have? How would they communicate information? Who would contribute to which decisions? How would talent be rewarded and measured? "Think about what it would actually look like if you could pull this [change] off," Shea says.

Some organizations create several scenes before they get a clear picture of what real change would look like, especially if it's is complex and involves many different players. Others feel that a single scene is enough. "You're done when you feel that it’s grounded and specific enough that you can figure out how to produce [that behavior]," Shea says.

2. Talk to your team.
Once you've created a scene, gather the people whose behavior will be affected -- the ones who will live the change. For example, if hospital administrators want to reduce the number of readmissions, they need to talk with all of the nurses, doctors, social workers, and caretakers who handle frequently readmitted patients. "Change lives in the details of the workplace," Shea says. "People at the most senior levels don’t know much about that."

Give the group an opportunity to review and discuss the scenes that you created. Ask, are they realistic? Are there other barriers preventing these behaviors? What would you add to these scenes? Not only will you get helpful insights to paint a more effective picture, you will also get buy-in from the people responsible for enacting the change.

3. Rethink the work environment.
Guided by your scenes and conversations, think about how the work environment needs to change to promote new behaviors. Set up the workplace so the behaviors you want are easy and incentivized, while the behaviors you don’t want meet resistance. For example, you might increase collaboration by switching to an open office plan, creating idea walls where people can ask and answer questions, setting up an internal chat system, and rewarding collaborative projects.

As you start to implement the changes, check back with your scenes to measure progress and make adjustments. "[Your scenes] shouldn't be taken as dogma," Shea says. "Change is an iterative process."

Nadia Goodman

Nadia Goodman is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY. She is a former editor at YouBeauty.com, where she wrote about the psychology of health and beauty. She earned a B.A. in English from Northwestern University and an M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University. Visit her website, http://nadiagoodman.com/